


Five Things That Never Happened to Christine Cagney

by jeanniebillroth



Category: Cagney and Lacey
Genre: 5 Things, Alternate Ending, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 18:22:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeanniebillroth/pseuds/jeanniebillroth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five roads not taken: Baby Broker / Choices / Role Call / Happiness Is A Warm Gun / Hello Goodbye. These drabbles go places the show didn't. They explore what might have been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Things That Never Happened to Christine Cagney

**Author's Note:**

> In case you are wondering where exactly the inspiration for these short pieces came from, or if you maybe don't remember what each episode was about, at the bottom of this page there are brief summaries of the episodes after which the drabbles are named and to which they add - or rather from which they deviate. Thank you for reading!

**1) Baby Broker**

 

His apartment is nicer than you expected. But you get right down to it without perfunctory offerings of coffee or further drinks or a tour of the place. Both of you know how these things work.

By one a.m., he has heard, seen and felt you come. Twice. You hate to admit it, but Victor Isbecki is good in bed.

Around five a.m., you awake with a start. Feeling suddenly very sober, you slip out of bed very quietly and head home for a shower and a change of clothes.

As you wash away the sticky evidence of last night, dread begins to settle in the pit of your stomach.

But Isbecki proves to be a gentleman. He never lets on, and neither do you. Sometimes you even wonder if it really happened.

 

***

**2) Choices**

 

The alarm rings at five a.m. You stumble into the bathroom and pee into a little cup. No luck going back to sleep afterwards, so you stare at the ceiling for two hours.

When you see the bright blue liquid in the testing tube sitting on your bathroom counter, you just know. Know instantly that you can’t possibly do this. It still breaks your heart.

You’re back at work one day after the procedure, feeling raw and on edge the whole day. Nobody except Mary Beth can ever know about this.

Later that night you drink half a bottle of scotch. Then you’re finally able to cry about it.

Six months later, you ace the Sergeants’ Exam.

 

***

**3) Role Call**  
  


Detective DeeDee annoys the hell out of you. As does Vicky Barrington, the actress who plays her.  
  
But it takes a couple of drinks late at night in your loft until you can admit to yourself why exactly that is.  
  
Sure – Vicky’s show is a jiggle show, another demeaning portrayal of women cops. But that’s not it. Not really, anyway.  
  
You hate that the jiggle makes you feel things you’d rather not feel. Things that make you want to act even more heterosexually aggressive than you already do.  
  
You’re afraid that if you don’t, someone will eventually notice the way you look at Mary Beth sometimes.

 

***

**4) Happiness Is A Warm Gun**  
  


When the bullet hits you, there is a split second during which you wish you’d worn that damn vest.  
  
If only you’d gone back to Charlie’s place last night and got it. But you were too tired and more than a little drunk, so you decided to screw it.  
  
Beyond that split second of regret there is nothing much unpleasant about the ten minutes during which you lie on the roof, your head in Mary Beth’s lap, police and ambulance sirens screeching in the streets below.  
  
Your partner’s mouth moves, but you don’t understand what she is saying. She’s crying, but you’re not sad.  
  
Somehow you always thought that dying would hurt. It doesn’t.

 

***

**5) Hello Goodbye**

  
  
Your ninth-inning baby arrives at 5:34 a.m. on a Tuesday in October after 16 hours of labor.  
  
When they place her on your chest, smeared with blood and goo, positively screaming her head off, all you can do is cry, too. David’s hands tremble as he cuts the cord.  
  
The little girl weighs in at 7 lbs 3 oz, measures exactly 20 inches and has a head full of red hair. You love her more than you ever thought possible.  
  
At the 14th, the winner of the Cagney Baby Quinella is one Sgt. Ronald Coleman. Everybody swears that they will never place a bet with him ever again.

 

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Baby Broker: In this episode, Cagney and Isbecki go undercover, posing as a married couple on welfare with a baby on the way in order to expose a ring of "baby brokers" who buy the children of women in urgent need of money and who then go on to sell them to wealthy couples unable to have children of their own and unable or unwilling to go the route of adoption. Having been recently dumped by her love interest of the week because of how preoccupied she is with her "grim and depressing" career as a cop, Cagney propositions Isbecki when they go to a bar together following the successful completion of the undercover case. But Isbecki realizes that Cagney is only asking him if he would like to go to bed with her because she is hurt (and a little bit drunk) and declines her offer, leaving her alone at the bar - well aware that he will be sorry in the morning for having been such a gentleman.
> 
> 2) Choices: This is the episode with Cagney's pregnancy scare. With her period two weeks late, Cagney is forced to consider the possibility of being single and pregnant, only to discover about halfway into the episode that she isn't pregnant after all. This experience prompts Cagney to face the fact that her biological clock is ticking and that if she ever wants to have a family of her own, she better start soon, or it will be too late for her. This drabble explores what, according to Barney Rosenzweig (the producer of C & L), would have been a road the episode could have taken, if it hadn't been for the impossibility of "selling" the network (CBS) on a storyline where Cagney, a single woman, gets pregnant and then chooses to have an abortion. Abortion was, according to Rosenzweig, what everybody involved in writing the show felt Cagney would have chosen had she really been pregnant.
> 
> 3) Role Call: Cagney and Lacey are being shadowed by Vicky Barrington, and actress who plays a cop on a hit television show and who has a desire to make her portrayal of "Detective DeeDee" more realistic by observing two real women cops on the job. All during the episode, Cagney is annoyed: Not only does the very attractive Vicky star in a "jiggle show", she also gets a whole lot of attention - from the men in the squad room, from random people on the street, and also from Mary Beth, who takes a liking to Vicky and even invites her into her home for dinner. Only towards the end of the episode does Cagney come around. She grudgingly recognizes that Vicky is just like any other woman doing her job and trying to be as good at it as she can possibly be, and that maybe she and Vicky are a lot more similar than she would like to admit.
> 
> 4) Happiness Is A Warm Gun: Late in season 6, Cagney's drinking gets increasingly out of control. In this episode, the whole of New York City is looking for a cop killer on the loose. Members of the force are encouraged to wear bullet-proof vests when out on the streets. On one occasion, Cagney and Lacey chase two youths on a rooftop, one of whom turns out to be armed. A shot is fired and Lacey is hit. She survives with only a bruise, however, because she was wearing her vest. Unlike Cagney, who, had she been the one who got hit, may not have made it through. Lacey gets very upset about how little Cagney appears to be caring whether she lives or dies. A NYPD-prescribed counseling session, during which Lacey confronts Cagney with her anger and helplessness in the face of Cagney's obvious problems, does nothing to resolve the growing tension between the women.
> 
> 5) Hello Goodbye: In this season-7 episode, Cagney and David Keeler get back together and David proposes to Chris. It turns out, however, that David has an idea of their future together that is fundamentally different from Cagney's. He imagines them having children (and eventually grandchildren) together. Cagney agrees that David should have children, seeing as he would make a wonderful father. She, on the other hand, doesn't want to have what she calls a "ninth-inning baby" at age 42. Saying that she doesn't know whether a husband and children were ever part of her dream (and that even if they were, that has changed now), Cagney declines David's offer of marriage, also on the grounds that she wants them to see each other because and when they want to, not because they have to. David, who wants to share a life with Cagney, breaks up with her. Later on, Cagney admits to Mary Beth that she sometimes struggles with the thought of never having her own children, but that she is okay with it most of the time.


End file.
